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And on the Seventh Day
- University of Illinois Press
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11 And on the Seventh Day* after Harry Partch And on the seventh day, petals fell in Petaluma, and the sky that day like a snow dome shaken, and the weird instruments built with gourds and the leather from worn saddles, built with guillotine blades, nuclear cloud chambers, fuel tanks, and the carved prows of canoes hollowed from logs—and the instruments spaced beneath the sky as the petals rained, scraps of velvet in reds and deep magenta and whites like the wings of tiny birds clipped to dwindle from the bodies of birds hung above the clouds. And between the patches of color softly descending in velvet address, a scarlet tanager wheeling like a mad arrow shot from a bow carved of antlers, a tanager like an unsheathed heart flung into the fever of falling color. And far downward in the valley, the soldiers lugging such indescribable velvet, a portage of fragrance to infuse in the water, miles from the trudging, on the far side of mountains. I asked the bird who sung from beneath his brilliant plumage, does he sing to hear his song in answer, or how is the alone directed (the alone in arrows, across to pierce, the alone in petals, a soft vaporous downward)—does the song arise from abandon, and in the abandon, is there a hope, a secret—such, would that the light be shared? Or would the new body arrived quench the Ārst to silence? And the light: of what liquid light, an amber tasting of honeysuckle, of what metal bent from the gun shafts down, from the belts of ammunition and the petals 12 falling into upturned bottles? Or if the silence, is it a radiant—a center in rays—and does the white of it shine, and with another, the arising, does the shining silence buoy the new soul? *And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma is the title of a musical composition by Harry Partch, composed in 1963–64, and revised in 1966, for instruments of his own invention. ...